Distributed Attitude Tracking of Multiple Rigid Body Systems Under an Uncertain Leader and Communication Link Faults

This paper investigates the leader-following consensus problem (LFCP) of multiple rigid body systems (MRBSs) with an uncertain leader and communication link faults (CLFs). We propose a fully distributed adaptive observer that can track the leader attitude and angular velocity on undirected networks, in which the designing of adaptive parameters does not rely on topology information. Interestingly, the observer can track uncertain leader states and settle the CLFs. A novel-designed Lyapunov function proves the convergence of the proposed observer. Then we use the certainty equivalence principle to demonstrate that the proposed distributed control laws can solve the MRBSs attitude-tracking problem with an uncertain leader. Finally, a numerical simulation example is given to verify the proposed control law is feasible.